[ImmortalA1000]

I was thinking of a rally game so only 1 car, and doing that via the hardware sprites (palette entries being unused for colours 17 to 32) but 64 pixel wide block of sprites might look stupidly small.

For the rest having an oversized copperlist rich 'photorealistic' background which is just panned/scrolled around as the lower playfield and a simple texture map engine for the overlaid road/mud layer with maybe just 1 bitplane for actual mud/dirt track and the 2nd and 3rd bitplane maybe for patches of green or something and again copperlist for fake depth cued palette.

Think of it as a 16bit version of Colin McRae 1/Sega Rally.

Basically it hinges on whether the 3D texture mapped stuff on foreground playfield would be as fast as if you used a 3 bitplane regular screen to draw on, hence the question. Also hinges on how much time is wasted 'scrolling' copperlists to match vertical movements of background being moved (which some 3D/2.5D racing games never bother to do for backgrounds) and change in height of drawn road/dirt track.

Might be obviously a dumb idea, I am not a coder let alone Shaun Southern exceeding demo coder, which is the sort of coding the idea hinges on and some very lateral thinking in the graphic design department.

(textured is not textured polygons like on a PS1/Saturn game but more like the dirt road effect in Lotus III/Lotus RECS...ie something a step above raster bars of flat polygon roads done before).

e.g. half way between Lotus II on Amiga and Racer 2 on the Falcon, not the quality of the texture mapped road engine but how the road is drawn in isolation over the panning separate photorealistic background underneath. Sega Rally does this as does Colin McRae 1.